Question about using Silverlight for both web and desktop application

Question

I'd like to start making a small project (nothing too fancy) for the desktop and web using Silverlight. Here are my questions:

1. Will I need Silverlight 4.0 or does 3.0 have out-of-browser features? Are there significant changes between the two versions, with regard to this?

2. What other options do I have besides Silverlight? I'm also considering using Silverlight for the online portion and a separate WPF project for the desktop. I don't have any Flash/Flex/Air experience. Besides .NET, I have some experience with C++, Java, and PHP.

3. Does anyone have experience with this? I know it's new technology (beta!) so I'm expecting bumps along the way. If I can just have one codebase, that would be fantastic, though.

Answer 1

1. silverlight 3 has out-of-browser features.

2. Beside silverlight the only alternative i can think of is (althought a bit different) Java Web Start technology - java desktop application downloaded from web server.

3. I used it in one project and there were no problems. The same silverlight control was presented in browser and could be installed as a desktop application with one click. Few lines of code was enought to achieve this. Here is some tutorial

Answer 2

To answer your first question:

While Silverlight 3 does have out-of-browser features, they are quite limited. With Silverlight 4 you can write a full-trust desktop application.

As pointed out in this blog post by Shawn Wildermuth:

In OOB, your application is still running in a browser (a window hosting IE on windows and Safari on Mac). It still lives in the same security sandbox as browser applications.

Which means that your application will have the same restrictions as it would if it was run from within a browser.